Defining Nature and Technology: Soyang Dam Construction and the Transformation of Rural Life in South Korea

• In Event: Envirotech Histories

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which the construction of the Soyang Dam in South Korea during the 1960s and early 1970s transformed rural life by continually redefining the human-nature relationship. When the central authority modified the environment, it inscribed particular human politics and values onto the landscape. Before the dam construction, Korean political elites and American engineers dispatched via the foreign aid program legitimized their dam construction plan with the argument that the natural environment of the Soyang River needed technological intervention because more than half of the annual runoff was “wasted” and flooded the area because of poor river regulation. After completion, however, the Soyang River was redefined as a “nature conservation area” in order to limit human activities near the dam site that would result in water contamination. Along with this redefinition of the human-built environment, eighteen thousand people living near the dam site were dislocated, and those who remained suffered economic hardship.
The Soyang Dam, the largest rock-fill dam in Asia, has been recognized as an emblem of the successful modernization of South Korea, but on the other hand, it masked local suffering in favor of national development. While drawing on documents collected from the National Archives in Korea, local newspapers, and oral history sources produced by the Archives of Korean History, this paper reveals that the boundary making between technology and nature served a particular political vision while marginalizing other ways of living with the river. My case study echoes recent studies of bridging insights from technology and environmental studies by showing that the binary between technology and nature is not predetermined, and the meanings of technology and nature vary according to a socio-political context. This paper ultimately shows that defining what is technological and natural in the world manifests political and ethical implications.

Author

• Seohyun Park, Virginia Polytechnic Institute